Technical Field
This disclosure relates generally to communications fabrics and more particularly to communications fabrics between processing elements.
Description of the Related Art
Many communications fabrics use a system of interconnected fabric units to arbitrate, aggregate, and/or route packets of messages between different processing elements. For example, some fabrics may use a hierarchical tree structure and process messages at each level in the tree. The processing performed at each level may include arbitration among packets from different processing elements, aggregating of packets belonging to the same message, operations to maintain memory coherency, etc. The processing at each level may be based on control packets in a given message. Other packets of a message, however, may not include information that is relevant to such processing. For example, some packets may include only a data payload.
Communications fabrics are often used in system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs that are often used in mobile devices such as cellular phones, wearable devices, etc., where power consumption is an important design concern.